Blinder, Caroline. 2020. Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America: Cartographiesof the Picturesque. Journal of American Studies, 54(3), pp. 582-603. ISSN 0021-8758 [Article]

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Richard Misrach and Kate Orrf’s Petrochemical America: Cartographies of the

Picturesque

This article looks at the landscape photographer Richard Misrach’s collaboration with

the architect Kate Orff in Petrochemical America (2012) a prizewinning examination

of the effects of the Oil Industry in the Mississippi Delta. Whilst situating its critique

of the oil industry in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Petrochemical America

nonetheless uses a variety of aesthetic devices from previous centuries and traditions,

in particular the use of the picturesque in landscapes of the nineteenth century.

Through this, and other mechanisms, the images in Petrochemical America become

potential allegories for the paradoxical co-existence of a picturesque nature visibly

affected by industrial transformation.

It was my intention to attempt a description of several districts remarkable for

their picturesqueness and truly American character … yet I cannot but express

my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are quickly passing away …

desecrated by what is called improvement; which, as yet, generally destroys

Nature's beauty without substituting that of Art.1

Thomas Cole, “On the The Destruction of Beautiful Landscapes” (1836)

1 Thomas Cole, “On the The Destruction of Beautiful Landscapes”, Essay on American Scenery, American Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1836)

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More than a century after Thomas Cole’s ruminations on the picturesque, Richard

Misrach and Kate Orff’s photo-text Petrochemical America (2012) charts the effects

of industrial pollution on southern Mississippi and Louisiana through its own use of

picturesque tropes and devices.2 However, while Petrochemical America is first and

foremost an overwhelming critique of “cancer alley”, the swathe of land stretching

from Baton Rouge to New Orleans infamous for its density of petrochemical plants,

pollution, and disease, it is also an exercise in a particular beautiful form of book

making; one in which the incongruities between the stark subject matter and its

inevitable aesthetic qualities play a significant role. This article will look closer at

how the textual and illustrative material supplied by Kate Orff’s design studio –

together with Misrach’s arresting and at times picturesque images – both temper and

invigorate the urgent nature of the book’s politics. While the destruction caused by

pollution in Misrach’s photographs is an overt presence, the real charge of the images

lies in those things that remind us of the picturesque even if presented obliquely; an

unbelievable sunset blocked out by fog, the lush greenness of a waterway rendered

toxic by waste. In this way, the presence of the picturesque becomes a pre-requisite

for its disruption in Petrochemical America. It forms a constituent part of the book’s

2 Described in the introduction as a “unique collaboration between a photographer and a landscape architect”, Petrochemical America consists of 47 photographs by Misrach followed by Orff’s ‘Ecological Atlas’ of written and drawn material, some added, superimposed or drawn on top of the preceding photographic material. Sub-sectioned into chapters, the ecological atlas moves from topics such as ‘Oil’, ‘Infrastructure’, and ‘Waste’, to ‘Ecology/Economy’ and lastly ‘Landscape’ ending with an added explanatory index of organisations and terms. In Misrach’s other on-going projects, The Desert Cantos (begun 1997) – a series of images of the American West and the later Border Cantos (begun 2004) set on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, the effects of ecological damage, colonisation, and industrial exploitation are also made visible.

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overall aesthetic just as it reminds us of just how beautiful the landscape being

disrupted and destroyed actually is.

The Picturesque as Political Tool

In its basic meaning, the word picturesque—resembling a picture or a painted scene,

something charming in appearance, or something able to evoke a vivid image—may

not readily align itself to the aesthetic design of a book on the effects of the oil

industry. However, Petrochemical America’s ability to evoke a vivid image of a

region whose pastoral qualities have been destroyed relies, amongst other things, on

its picturesque qualities. To highlight the precarious state of the landscapes shown,

Petrochemical America uses the picturesque as a marker for what has been lost as

well as as an interrogation into how various forms of framing directs our gaze towards

that loss. To understand this use of the picturesque, however, a word seldom used in

connection with twentieth and twenty-first-century photography of disaster areas, it is

useful to return to the origins of the term, in particular: William Gilpin’s Three

Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape

(1792).3

Gilpin’s ideas on the superiority of the picturesque within landscape gardening

and pictorial composition relies, at its heart, on the belief in an equal measure of

unadulterated, unchanged nature together with a more organised, horticulturally

3 Alongside Richard Payne Knight’s The Landscape (1794) and Sir Uvedale Price’s Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with The Sublime and The Beautiful (1810) Gilpin’s work still forms the foundation for a conventional reading of the 18th century attempt to establish a category alongside and in response to Edmund Burke’s more spectacular and more well-known definition of the sublime in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

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designed version. As Gilpin puts it in the introduction to his Observations on the

River Wye:

Nature is always great in design; but unequal in composition … Nature gives

us the material of landscape … but leaves us to work them up into pictures …I

am so attached to my picturesque rules, that if nature gets it wrong, I cannot

help putting her right…the picture is not so much the ultimate end, as it is the

medium, through which the ravishing scenes of nature are excited in the

imagination.”4

In Gilpin’s version of the picturesque here, nature’s purpose is to enhance a particular

perspective, one that enables “the imagination” to be excited rather than necessarily

persuaded by the reality of what it views. As such, it makes sense that the presence of

various picturesque tropes, or rather, the impulse to ‘put nature right’ is often

overseen in contemporary landscape photography. If the picturesque is partly about

putting ‘nature right’ it must also be antithetical to the recuperative, realist impulse of

photographs of polluted and vulnerable areas, a form of photography dedicated to

showing people the “real” effects of ecological disasters. In this sense, the concept of

the sublime – with its focus on awe and fear – and on that which seems beyond our

immediate control, presents itself as a much more attractive template than that of the

picturesque.

An instance of this can be seen in Cecile Whiting’s “The Sublime and the

Banal in Postwar Photography of the American West”. Here, she argues that although

4 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, introduction, [1782] (London: Pallas Athene Publishers, 2005), p.17.

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20th and 21st century American landscape photography appears to “present a

straightforward opposition: pristine, spectacular wilderness in contrast to man-made

development and destruction,” the move into the type of aesthetic that pervaded the

New Topographics from the 1970s onwards was in reality a continuation of a longer

art historical tradition in which the sublime took precedence.5 Citing how “Late

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and American landscape artists

varied in their interpretation of the sublime” Whiting nonetheless points to a crucial

move within American visual art; one in which the picturesque aligns itself to that of

the sublime. From a vision “which highlighted the theatrical aspects of romanticism”

in transcendent landscape paintings of sunsets and grand vistas, the sublime gradually

morphed into a vision “that increasingly cultivated an appreciation for a moral

sublime”, one in which environmental concerns began to take precedence.6 Misrach’s

visions of Cancer Alley constitute perfect versions of the Whiting’s ‘moral’ sublime

because they – as Whiting puts it - open up “an aesthetic that sprouted out of, rather

than eschewed, the imprint of humans on earth”.7 As a study of the after effects of

‘the imprint of humans on earth’, Petrochemical America combines the moral sublime

with what Gilpin saw as one of the main tropes of the picturesque; namely the desire

to work them “into pictures”.

For David Punter, the different ways that we define the Picturesque and the

Sublime tend to detract from the fact that they are born out of a similar impulse; the

impulse to establish a set of rules for how we should ideally relate to our environment.

As Punter argues: “The Picturesque is in fact tied into the same psychic constellation

5 Cecile Whiting, ‘The Sublime and the banal in Post War Photography of the American West’ American Art Volume 27, No 2 (Summer 2013), p.3. 6 Ibid. p. 7. 7 Ibid. p. 12.

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(as the sublime); nature is there to be improved upon, to be adapted”. 8 For Punter,

then, the Picturesque should not be read in opposition to the sublime but as a way to

navigate a territory perilously posed between the two. According to Punter: “The

Picturesque … represents the movement of enclosure, control, the road which moves

securely and fittingly into the countryside, the comforting flanking, the side-screen …

roughness subjected to symmetry’. 9

Using Gilpin’s definition as a starting point, Punter reads the picturesque as a

way to organize an otherwise insurmountable or disorientating view. However, within

this the seeds of something unmanageable are allowed to persist, precisely because

the need to enclose and to control the landscape is a constituent part of what creates

the Picturesque in the first place. This is crucial, for it allows the picturesque to be

read as an investigation into what exactly constitutes territorial integrity as much as

painterly enjoyment; two issues that this article will argue are present in Misrach’s

photographs in equal measure.

If ‘Cancer Alley’ has all the hallmarks of the sublime, it also uses what Punter calls

the ‘comforting flanking’ of various objects both natural and man-made to frame the

view. Whatever roughness is presented in the form of discarded materials, debris, or

ruined nature, it too is more often than not subjected to symmetry’ within the frame.

In other words, rather than show us the toxicity of the landscape as something that

overtly disturbs the eye, it is made palpable in other more subtle and often

paradoxically picturesque ways.

8 David Punter, The politics of the picturesque: literature, landscape, and aesthetics since 1770, eds. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1994) p.122. 9 Ibid. p.224.

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Insert Fig. 1. Here

Robert Misrach, Night Releases, Mississippi River Corridor, Louisiana, 1998. ©

Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

In Fig. 1 railcars rest quietly beneath a dense network of power lines, shrouded in

what appears to be yellowish grey fog. It is not incidental that the fog is a toxin-laden

vapour and that in the background the outlines of industrial buildings and petroleum-

processing infrastructure are barely discernible. In shots of actual highways, bridges

and pipelines, humans themselves are seldom in evidence – the straight lines of

human-made objects, on the contrary, seem to lead the eye away from the scene itself

and towards something unseen, something intimated, menacing as well as potentially

beautiful. In and of themselves the images, with their low contrast and soft focus,

reinforce an idea of a landscape more comatose than anguished, more forgotten than

ravished. In this context, the presence of the picturesque renders a vision of nature in

which things are just visible enough to be vulnerable, but not visible enough to be

overwhelming.

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Insert Fig. 2. Here

Robert Misrach, New Housing Construction, Paulina, Louisiana, 2010. © Richard

Misrach, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Insert Fig. 3. Here

Kate Orff, ‘Bigger, Farther, Filled with more Stuff’, 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape

Architecture PLLC.

In Fig. 2 Misrach’s ‘New Housing Construction’, the photograph of a new build

forms the visual foundation for an architecturally drawn version in Section II (Fig. 3).

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Here a segmented close-up is surrounded by the material goods that will eventually

come from occupancy of the house as either waste or recyclable commodities.

Insert Fig. 4. Here

Kate Orff, ‘From Pipe to Plastic Bag’, 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape Architecture

PLLC.

The two main sections of Petrochemical America operate in tandem in this way,

allowing Misrach’s photographs in Section I to form the backdrop for the various

drawn material, superimposed information and text in Section II. The superimposition

of data and drawings onto the photographs in Section II thus has several purposes:

information that cannot readily be gleaned from the photographs renders the

consequences of decades of industrial expansion in more graphic terms and in turn,

the graphic nature of Misrach’s perspective is given a more overt architectural and

spatial dimension. Just as Misrach’s photographs in Section I are designed to be more

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than simply backdrops for Orff’s cartographic material in Section II, the

superimposed material draws out the implications of the photographs in ways that are

not readily perceivable in the photographs alone. The imposition of the cartographic

material inevitably alters the illustrative nature of the photographs: it not only

politicises the images in different ways it aestheticizes the process of doing so.

The use of Orff’s cartographic material in section II of the book does not

however guarantee that Petrochemical America – with its attempted representation of

a particularly ingrained and insidious pollution – moves away entirely from a

potentially reductive idealisation of the US South. One of the more noticeable facets

of Petrochemical America is that it hovers between clearly referencing a particular

type of southern iconography and staying clear of stereotypical versions of

‘southerness’. In Fig. 4, it is only the actual naming of the Dow Chemical Plant that

distinguishes the images from any number of industrial plants in America. In fact,

one might argue that it is often the memory of a pastoral version of the South that

facilitates the type of warning presented in Petrochemical America rather than any

sense of its visible presence. The book’s interest in the effects of industry and

modernity on the American landscape returns to a pastoral vision of the South

because it needs such a vision to demarcate a change that isn’t always easy to gauge.

As such, the photo-textual project is partly to navigate the politics of such a vision,

and it is the use of the picturesque as a way to en-frame earlier traditions both

painterly and photographic that enable it.

The Throughlines as Methodology

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In Kate Orff’s own explanatory notes for the project the cartographic material, the so-

called ecological atlas in Section II is created through the use of “a visual narrative

called a ‘throughline’”, a device in which a layering of information combines visual

superimposition - as seen in Fig. 3 and 4 - with various forms of descriptive data.

While this data provides a historical and geographical sense of the changes in the

landscape, it also connects the visible effects of the pollution - more or less palpable

in Misrach’s photographs - with its more invisible ones, drawings of things that no

longer occupy the region; wildlife, communal structures, the outline of previous

churches and cemeteries, places now too polluted to be habitable. These

‘throughlines’ enable a palimpsest of information, or – as Orff says – they enable the

latent narratives in Misrach’s photographs to emerge as a series of vivid mental

images. Once again, it is the impulse towards improving nature that allows for the

picturesque to emerge in what might otherwise have been ‘simply’ a ‘documentary’

style photograph.

As such, while the ‘throughlines’ contain a distinctly narrative element, they

also contain a picturesque quality that references various aesthetic techniques already

present in the photographs despite their realist subject matter. According to Steven

Hoelscher, photography’s embrace of the picturesque grew out of a general Victorian

"search for order" during a period of economic unrest in the nineteenth century, but

more crucially, it participated in the creation of a new, middle-class, post-frontier

space as well. By turning nature into picturesque scenery, certain regional

transformations (not to mention various colonial crimes) could be glossed, allowing

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photography to dictate what “the viewer should see, how it should be seen, and when

it should be seen all in a matter of fact and seemingly unmediated way”.10

Hoelscher’s argument pertains specifically to the rise of touristic views and

the ensuing commodification of landscape photography. Nonetheless, Misrach’s

depiction of a contaminated landscape – despite being critical of the effects of

commodification - still carries the residue of this ‘Victorian’ desire for a more

ordered version of a landscape potentially “out of control”. Misrach’s images may

appear to be “unmediated” versions of the harsh realities of Cancer Alley, but the

measured gaze and considered perspectives are clearly designed to allow - in line with

Gilpin’s definition of the picturesque – a comprehensive and in some ways ordered

view of the surroundings.

Similarly, Orff’s cartographic ‘throughlines’ in Section II are as reminiscent of

anatomical, horticultural and geographical cartographies of previous centuries, as they

are indicators of a contemporary sensibility in ecological terms. They, too, create a

pathway for how we might order and mediate an essentially invisible form of

pollution, at least in photographic terms. The attention to detail and the delicately

veined outlines of the superimposed drawings in Section II share an affinity with

eighteenth and nineteenth-century 3D atlases just as they form a template for a

particular form of digital info-graphics and contemporary mapping for the post-

industrial age. In this sense, the decorative quality of the ‘throughlines’ has more than

simply an informative role. The delicate lines of Orff’s drawings as seen in Fig. 3

10 Steven Hoelscher, The Photographic Construction of Tourist Space in Victorian America, (American Geographical Society: Geographical Review, Vol. 88, No. 4, J. B. Jackson and Geography (Oct., 1998), pp. 548-570, p.549.

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appear ingrained in the photographs themselves, facilitating narratives that according

to Orff are already there. In addition, the picturesque qualities of the ornate drawings

of material objects, animals, and spaces invoke a more emotive sense of the data

supplied. It is not that the cartography merely turns Misrach’s polluted spaces into

something that on the face of it appears more decorative than the subject warrants, it

enhances a picturesque quality already present in the photographs.

In this respect, both Misrach and Orff ‘s use of Cancer Allery indicates an

awareness of the inevitably staged and "picturesque" quality that resides even in

images designed to be “neutral”. Misrach’s foregrounding of certain elements, the use

of vertical structures, be they trees or chemical plants, to coincide with the

photograph’s margin, the provision of depth and movements – are all designed to give

an overwhelming sense of how nature has been subsumed by industry. At the same

time, they enable the viewer to understand the landscape more comprehensibly. Thus,

while the use of the picturesque originally presented a version of America as

predominantly restorative and/or pastoral, the semblance of something romanticised

or pastoral can also, as Hoeschler points out, indicate that the image is about “the

passage from one state into another”. Even though the stillness and apparent

contemplative nature of Misrach’s images seem appropriate to the polluted landscape,

the underlying subject (namely deterioration and eventual destruction of habitats) is -

as the throughlines illustrate – an on-going narrative.

Orff’s ‘throughlines’ although designed to function as a distinctly twenty-first century

form of eco-atlas, thus inevitably carry the weight of previous cartographic practice.

And yet, by filtering it through the picturesque it aligns itself with a particular history

and lineage of American landscape photography as well. If nineteenth century

American cartography and photography was fixated on the United States an as

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emerging nation state, Petrochemical America charts – paradoxically - many of the

same concerns by looking at the effects of environmental expansionism through a

twentieth and twenty-first century lens.

The fact that much of Misrach’s landscape iconography owes a debt to the

cartographic practice of earlier decades and centuries is of course not surprising. From

the nineteenth century surveys of the American West by Timothy O’Sullivan and

William Henry Jackson, to the post-war portfolios of Robert Adams, Edward

Burtynsky, Mitch Epstein, David Meisel, and of course Misrach — to name just a

few —the constraints and strengths of landscape photography have inevitably been

linked to the challenges of capturing temporal processes (whether it be changes in

tourism, infrastructure and habitation, or change and decay). Earlier attempts to chart

and map the ‘wilderness’ of America, in order to incorporate it into an emerging

capitalist infrastructure, are also present as a response to the effects of ‘civilising’ that

wilderness and what it has done in industrial terms. In other words, the two are part of

the same continuum even if their aims are vastly different.

Nor is it strange that American versions of landscape photography tend to cast

a broadly colonising eye on its surrounding environment regardless of century or

decade. Originally employed to map the colonising efforts of American settlers and

the most expeditious ways to occupy territory, mapping in the eighteenth and

nineteenth century was always operating in a dual capacity; a capacity that

paradoxically mirrors those tensions brought up by and in contemporary landscape

photography. As a practical tool for an expansionist ideology and as an aestheticizing

tool designed to sanctify and glorify the labour and results of that ideology, mapping’s

focus on how to best render agricultural and industrial progress is also – although in

different ways – at the heart of Petrochemical America. Misrach may not be shoring

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up the same colonial anxieties as his nineteenth and twentieth century antecedents, but

he is still unashamedly involved in how landscape photography functions as an agent

of progress, for better or for worse.

In this respect, Petrochemical America’s aesthetic quality – its very look -

hinges on more than the photographs to indicate what has and might happen in terms

of ecological disasters. It also hinges on the fact that its imagery invariably references

a period in which the picturesque quality of the landscape was seen as proof of, rather

than a critique of, America’s divine right to access its natural resources. In other

words, if Petrochemical America is about the misuse of natural resources, it is also an

at times incongruous continuation of a form of mapping that originates in the

expansionist ethos of an earlier era. This does not automatically make the look of the

book contradictory to the ethical concerns of the material itself nor does the presence

of the picturesque disqualify its political efficacy. It simply means that both Misrach

and Orff are engaged in in a longer and more complex history of the sanctification of

the American landscape.

On multiple levels then, Petrochemical America is charged with a task not

dissimilar to that of the picturesque, namely dealing with the aestheticizing effect

photographic framing has on how we view landscapes politically. For Catrin Gersdorf

in ‘History, Technology, Ecology: Conceptualising the Cultural Function in

Landscape’, Misrach’s photography is in fact a particularly good example of how to

straddle the line between art photography and advocacy. Thematically and

aesthetically, Gersdorf argues, Misrach does not uncritically perpetuate a picturesque

tradition of landscape painting and photography even if he gravitates towards “an

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enchanted, spectacular, and yet extremely injured maltreated terrain”.11 For Gersdorf,

it is precisely Misrach’s interest in “the power play of biology, economy, topography,

and ideology” that ensures his ability to align the politics of pollution with the

‘spectacular’ aspects of the terrain. In this respect, Misrach utilises the picturesque

qualities in the landscape in order to illuminate the intersections between economics

and a topography both critical and indicative of previous aesthetic and political

traditions.

Gersdorf’s argument, however, is not based on a reading of Petrochemical

America but on Misrach’s Desert Cantos, an on-going photographic project begun in

1979 mostly of vast arid landscapes of the American West. Inscribed by technological

and commercial usage, Desert Cantos often show what appear to be uninhabited sites

ranging from waste dumps to military zones in which the intersection between nature

and various forms of human encroachment are particularly palpable. Acknowledging

the inevitable conceptual challenge posed by "critical landscape photography” Desert

Cantos, according to Gersdorf, “imaginatively re-design landscape” not as an

idealization of the natural or the technological sublime “but as a product emerging

from the power play of biology, economy, topography, ideology, geology and

religion.”12

In this respect, Desert Cantos proves a particularly useful example of how critics tend

to read Misrach photos; namely as a refashioning of stand-alone landscape

photographs that confirm their applicability to contemporary issues such as migration

and ecology. Nonetheless, the Cantos are fundamentally different from Petrochemical

11 Catrin Gersdorf, ‘History, Technology, Ecology: Conceptualizing the cultural function of landscape’ in Icon, Vol. 10 (2004), pp. 34-52, p.45. 12 Ibid. p.49.

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America, a project designed as a photo-textual exercise above all. While both projects

strive to embody the tension between an aestheticized landscape and its usefulness in

political and ideological terms, the fact that the terrain charted in the Cantos could be

from any number of regions is crucial. By charting the ‘sameness’ of many territories

across a vast area, the Desert Cantos are partly about the homogeneity of capitalist

exploitation, whereas in Petrochemical America, the cartographic material reiterates

the specificity of singular figures and communities, all the way down to local species

and animals indigenous to ‘Cancer Alley’. Another difference is that while the havoc

wreaked on the landscapes of Desert Cantos is signposted very clearly in the

photographs, it is not necessarily so in Petrochemical America.

Rather than define Petrochemical America as picturesque per se, the

decorative aspects of the cartographic material could be read as a form of re-

enactment of the picturesque, or, as something that enables already existing

picturesque elements in the photographs to emerge more clearly. Many of the

landscapes in Section I are arresting, photographically and emotionally, not because

they show pollution as frightful or ugly or even as a scar on the landscape, but

because the pollution overwhelms the scene as something both intangible and yet

compelling visually. This sense that something elusive is being marked out, or rather

framed through Misrach’s measured gaze, is - as previously mentioned - linked to a

history of mapping the United States as a nation more broadly, but it is also crucially

linked to an ontology of disaster photography as a genre in itself. As John Roberts

points out in ‘Photography and the Photograph: Event, Archive and the Non

Symbolic’ the very concept of disaster photography relates to the medium’s

ontological status because it points to something intrinsic within the photographic

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process; the fact that as a document of a particular time and place, the photograph is

always at its heart an image of the event after the fact. According to Roberts:

in this photography there is clear sense that photography has arrived after the

event to record what remains of the event, … Essentially, this is a photography

of the event-as-aftermath … emphasising the melancholic allure of

photographic stillness. This kind of elegiac and mournful photography has a

long history … Alexander Gardner, Roger Fenton, Mathew Brady, … through

to Richard Misrach, … it represents photography trying to establish a new

reportorial role for itself by making a case for the necessary lateness of the

photograph.13

For Roberts, the role of the photographer as reporter, artist, and narrator allows ‘the

event as aftermath’ to take centre stage within a genre marked equally by nineteenth,

twentieth and twenty-first-century histories of photography. Orff’s throughlines in

this context operate as part of what Roberts might define as a ‘reconstruction of

evidence’ a way to flesh out the ‘remains’ of the pollution that constitutes the event –

however intangible. By comparing such photographs to Mathew Brady’s Civil War

images, littered with another form of very palpable human waste in the form of

corpses, Roberts’ reading of the documentary impetus is hardly optimistic.

Photography not only has to ‘make a case for its necessary lateness’, it necessarily

operates with the knowledge that this is impossible. In several ways, then,

Petrochemical America is symptomatic of the impossible premise of such a desire, a

13 John Roberts, ‘Photography and the Photograph: Event, Archive and the Non-Symbolic’, Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 2 (2009), p. 289.

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book whose narrative point and aesthetic charge can only rely on the aftermath as

essential to the photographic process. More importantly, within the use of the

picturesque lies another constituent trait of Misrach’s work, namely that ‘photography

of the event-as-aftermath … tends to stress” just as its nineteenth century forerunners

did, ‘the melancholic allure of photographic stillness’ in very picturesque terms.

The fact that Petrochemical America shares what Roberts defines as ‘the

melancholic allure of photographic stillness’ does not mean however that it is

fundamentally stuck in time. One of the aims of Section II’s Ecological Atlas is

precisely to indicate that the situation documented has a history of economic misuse,

racism and social displacement and that changes in law and practice can, if not

radically alter, then at least disrupt the process of continuous pollution. However,

while Orff’s writing and drawings in Section II indicate a long sociological history of

human, regional and geographical abuse, what Roberts deems particularly elegiac and

mournful in Misrach’s photographic visions is as much artistic as it is sociological.

This sense of melancholia – rendered through the stillness that Roberts defines - has

to find, as it were, a resting place together with the wider political point of the book. If

Petrochemical America is a warning about the future damage of unhindered pollution,

a project designed to warn future generations of what will happen to other places and

regions, Misrach’s environments are somewhat distanced from this sense of urgency.

In other words, the stillness of the photographs may be another reason why they risk

being subsumed by their own picturesque if mournful qualities.

For Misrach this comes through precisely in the “allure of photographic

stillness”; a restrained sense of the beauty of the landscape as modified and enabled

by the intrusion of the effects of the industrial. The photographs aesthetically recall

the past even if they invoke something unmistakably contemporary. If Misrach’s

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photographs facilitate a sense of mourning and loss it is because of the presence of the

picturesque rather than its absence. To facilitate this, the landscapes tend to distance

the observer in ways that are similar to that of the traditional picturesque view-point.

We are thus drawn in as witnesses to something that is near enough to be understood

and yet far enough away to not be directly threatening. Likewise, the constant

presence of smoke and pollution in Petrochemical America often functions literally as

a smoke screen that sets the landscape further away from the viewer, as seen very

visibly in Fig. 1. One could argue that underlying Misrach’s use of the picturesque

lies an attempt to establish some limits to our experience of nature; limits not entirely

unlike that advocated by Gilpin’s eighteenth century version. Here, however, those

limits are also in place to show how the damage done to nature constitutes a form of

alienation, one rendered in visual, political and aesthetic terms simultaneously.

The Picturesque as Historical Marker

Because the picturesque in photographic terms is often read as exclusively visual and

so ultimately indifferent to the political, social and moral aspects of what it renders,

Misrach’s subject matter appears unrelated to the more conventional picturesque

principles of framing. However, as seen, it is acutely aware of such tropes. The use of

side-screens, distant perspectives and the architectural intrusion of ruinous material –

abandoned sites and structures – while central to the landscape tradition, may seem

incidental, but of course shares crucial qualities with the picturesque. Often the

photographs defeat recession to a distant point; planes extend horizontally, and the

image presents itself as a segment of a continuum, casually cut off by the borders on

the top and to the left and right. While the presence of decay and roughness could be

21

read as an aspect of the sublime rather than the picturesque, for Misrach the

immersion of pollution into the surrounding air, shown through lighting and

perspective provides a landscape in which industrial ruins, rather than idealized sites

of past triumphs and accomplishments, are solid reminders of a longer history of

natural exploitation. According to Misrach:

People were living side by side with these great industrial behemoths. I’d

always thought of industrial sites as sacrifice zones, in that they would be off

in an isolated area, like in Nevada with the nuclear test site in the middle of

nowhere. It never occurred to me that people would live within feet of these

toxic environments. I was really shocked to see that in the United States. 14

The narrative of toxicity outlined here goes beyond one of corporate misappropriation

and pollution. In fact, the proximity between human habitation and ‘industrial

behemoths’ signals a violent intrusion of the industrial into the private; an intrusion

inscribed into the landscape itself. This is partly what is tempered by the enforced

distance between Misrach’s camera and the scene photographed even when it is

designed to draw us back into the realm of human comprehension and compassion.

Again, one of the ways in which the photographs do so is by being recast as a distinct

scene, in other words, a picturesque view. If Section II works discernibly towards

something more immersive by giving the reader/viewer material to digest and apply,

Section I provides a different vantage point by stressing that what we see as outsiders

in the photograph may not be the whole picture.

14 https://aperture.org/blog/richard-misrach-and-kate-orff-in-conversation/

22

Misrach’s oil pipes and endless highways are thus often presented as objects

that, like a series of views or pictures in a gallery, can be faced squarely and with a

certain sense of uniformity. In Petrochemical America, Misrach does not suddenly

shift his perspectival framing from the ground to the air or from middle distance to a

close up of some mass produced architectural feature; he chooses instead to hover

somewhere between a bird’s eye view and one made possible by a bystander or

observer at some distance in the landscape. The effect of this is that, as observers, we

are situated vis-à-vis the images in ways that are similar to an exhibition in an art

gallery. Not only does this add to a rarified sense of the photographs as art objects, it

allows the picturesque qualities of the landscapes to indicate the intrusion of

something polluting into an otherwise aesthetically pleasing scene.

For the critic Mark Feldman, this is an inherent part of images of polluted

sites. As he argues in his review of Petrochemical America:

sublime large-scale color photographs of the sites of resource extraction, transport,

processing, consumption and waste — might in fact harden and inure us to the

presence of environmental damage. Too often such works prompt fleeting twinges of

conscience but encourage little sustained response, because ultimately the images —

no matter how extraordinary or sensational or troubling — provide only partial

information.15

15 Mark Feldman, as quoted in: https://placesjournal.org/article/illuminating-the-

petrochemical-landscape/

23

In Petrochemical America, however, Section II with its explanatory data and

superimposed images appears precisely to counter such an accusation by providing

more than ‘partial information’. Even though the photographs rarely show any of the

actual labour involved in the ‘extraction, transport, processing, and consumption’ of

resources, the unseen presence and consequences of toxic materials is reiterated in the

“proof” offered in Section II’s throughlines. An example can be found in Chapter IV

“Displacement” a case study of ‘Regional Displacement Over Time’. In Fig. 5 the

Mississippi is shown from above as a sinewy artery winding itself through various

communities, whose inhabitants have all been displaced through harassment, legal

action, buyouts and payoffs by major chemical plants. The drawn symbols

superimposed onto Misrach’s photograph show – amongst other things - the

cemeteries, churches and freedman’s towns of the reconstruction era that are no

longer present. The throughline in this instance adds the human data and the historical

markers of previous lives and communities to the photographs in order to provide a

more palpable sense of loss. Even in this part though, the sites and places documented

are notably void of human figures, as though they are visions of a state of nature put

on hold (not dissimilar to nineteenth century photographs of American vistas) rather

than a region contaminated by too much human activity. Again, a link can be made to

the mapping of America during previous centuries in which indigenous settlements

were rarely marked as present in order to accentuate the ‘virgin’ nature of the land. In

this context, the involuntary migratory patterns of local inhabitants in the twentieth

and twenty-first century mimic that of native populations originally displaced through

genocide and colonial aggression, putting the large oil corporations on a par with

earlier ruthless forms of expansionism. For Orff these historical similarities are

24

unmistakeable. As she puts it: ‘On a regional scale, the African and Cajun diasporas

are simply repeated’.16

Within Petrochemical America, the repeated nature of American colonisation

as internal, domestic and primarily economically motivated allows the throughlines to

operate as geographical proof of an expansionist ideology set in place centuries ago

and now continued by the energy industry. Pollution itself becomes a substrata that

may be invisible to the eye of the photographer, but nonetheless visible to the reader

once it has been unpacked. In other words, a particular subterranean narrative unfolds

or is made visible through the throughlines:

The idea of unpacking really came from Richard’s narrative-rich photographs,

where I could see phantom stories within every image, which is sort of an

aesthetic reading, but I wanted to know more in terms of understanding the

complex web of industrial and ecological and human stories that may have

given shape to that image.17

For Orff, the throughline functions as a process of photo-textual narration rather than

a fixed concept; a process capable of tracing change across time as well as a way to

reuse existing aesthetic models in cartographic terms. Referring again to the chapter

entitled ‘Displacements’, the throughline is described as something that disrupts the

static nature of the photograph, mimicking instead the fluidity of time passing and of

the Mississippi itself:

16 Misrach and Orff, Petrochemical America, p. 161. 17 https://aperture.org/blog/richard-misrach-and-kate-orff-in-conversation/

25

The second drawing in that series, the map at river scale, was one of the last drawings

in the entire book to be completed … seeking to understand and compile stories of

buyouts and displacement from probably thirty different sources … We overlaid those

stories with information … so it becomes a portrait of a certain scale and type of

community fabric and relationships being replaced by a different scale of industrial

fabrics, scales, and material relationships.18

By combining archival data with a visual guide to the flow of the river the course of

regional history is aligned with that of the Mississippi itself. The line of the river

carrying the historical baggage of the region itself as a source of power and

mechanisation, as well as a transportation route for slaves and produce.

Insert Fig. 5 Here.

Kate Orff, Toxic Release Mapping, 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape Architecture PLLC.

18 https://aperture.org/blog/richard-misrach-and-kate-orff-in-conversation/

26

The combination of archival data and the visual rendition of the river’s flow becomes

a continuous stream of information both literally and figuratively; a stream that

connects a wider historical perspective with the actual ‘material relationships’

outlined by Orff. At the same time, an interesting counterpoint is established between

Misrach’s more static vistas in Section I and the flow of information in Section II. In

seeking, as Orff puts it, to render unseen ‘histories’ of displacement intrinsic to the

region, Section II is charged with the not inconsiderable task of creating a “portrait of

a certain scale and type of community fabric”. The inhabitants of those communities

may no longer be visible in the photographs but the throughlines signal their absence

nonetheless.

If the methodical and more systematic use of information, grids, statistics and

other forms of data allows Misrach’s photographs to function as backdrops for the

environmental agenda, the throughlines facilitate the presence of the picturesque

despite their apparent role as predominantly factual and informative. What they do is

enable Petrochemical America’s more neutral gaze to accommodate the picturesque

as something both inherent in the framing of the landscapes, and as something

indicative of a longer history of American photography’s relationship with its own

environment. For instance, Misrach’s interest in industrial architecture and the fact

that so many of the images in the book appear to be fairly unspoiled by that

architecture and yet deeply marked by its effects, is fundamental to the book’s

aesthetic and political charge. In this respect, the images of industrial sights both

beautiful and horrific mark an inherent contradiction, a contradiction at its most

palpable when it is most under risk of extinction. Misrach in fact uses various

structures themselves as staging areas for these contradictions; sites where an idea of

27

national character based on consumption persist despite the visual proof of its harmful

effects on the environment.

Petrochemical America as Activist Photo-Text

For Stephanie LeMenager, our society’s continued psychological and economic

reliance on oil offers a short-hand for grasping a network of power and control that

plays out on a multitude of platforms – photography included. However, as

LeMenager argues, the risk in such readings is often that our reliance on oil becomes

something so overwhelming and insurmountable it prevents any potential for

change.19 Granted, in many of Misrach’s more oblique photographs of polluted

environments, it can similarly be difficult to glean what the actual effects of various

forms of toxic waste are. To counter this potential obliqueness, many of these images

rely in unexpected ways on both pre-existing historical knowledge and the reader’s

ability to literally read between the lines of the image. In fig. 6 for instance, Misrach

shows the irony of the juxtaposition between a particular type of Southern heritage in

the form of an antebellum mansion, which upon closer inspection is now too polluted

to enter. The image of an abandoned Southern mansion, previously a tourist site but

now closed is a double reminder of both past and present crimes; the home financed

by slave labor and now destroyed by the effects of another form of ruthless

capitalism.

19 Stephanie LeMenager, ‘Oil! The Aesthetics of Petroleum after Oil!’ in American Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Sustainability in America (Oxford University Press, Spring 2012), pp. 59-86.

28

Insert Fig. 6. Here – Richard Misrach, Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, Acquired by

Shell Chemical, Geismar, Louisiana, 1998. © Richard Misrach, Fraenkel Gallery, San

Francisco.

The issue of how a continuum of experience can imply both a history and a sense of

immanence is crucial, partly because it touches on an idea of timeliness that

incorporates both historical and social dimensions similar to Roberts’s definition of

documentary photography. As Orff puts it: ‘Richard’s photographs capture a specific

moment in time and space, but if you think about time as a continuum – of past-

present-future-relative to the photographs … one photograph can touch so many

different issues and situations.’ 20

The sense of immanence in Misrach’s photographs become a way to impart

information on multiple levels and it allows Orff to describe the political efficacy of

the image in transcendent rather than purely documentary terms. In Orff’s

throughline, ‘time as a continuum’ is not antithetical to the photograph as a form of

art that captures static, still moments; it is simply another way to synthesise that

particular vision into a wider political process. Orff describes this process as a way to

20 https://aperture.org/blog/richard-misrach-and-kate-orff-in-conversation/

29

conceptualise “the local environment … understanding the mutual and systemic

connections between people and the earth, between landscapes and communities …

synthesizing these disparate factors into a cohesive set of systems.”21

The throughline’s process of layering also bears crucial similarities to a more

tangible layering; namely that of various geographical strata. Orff’s ‘synthesizing of

these disparate factors into a cohesive set of systems’ is accentuated in the very last

section of Petrochemical America where another ‘layer’ a “Glossary of Terms &

Solutions for a Post-Petrochemical Culture” is added: a listing of concepts,

organisations, scientific, sociological and ethnographic terms (originally a 24-page

pamphlet nestled into a pocket inside the back cover). On the one hand, the glossary

reinforces Orff’s belief in the importance of grassroots’ ventures. On the other hand, it

also somewhat at odds with Misrach’s more melancholy photographs. One of the

reasons for this disjunction between the first two sections and the glossary as a form

of post-script lies within the nature of the cartographic practice itself. While the

varied set of discourses within Petrochemical America reflect the selective and partial

process of cartographic practice, it also signals the on-going pollution and the

impossibility of dealing with it comprehensibly. Ultimately what is not mapped, what

remains uncharted, underground, and unexplained is as crucial as that seen and

measured in the book.

This sense of both the limitations and advantages of mapping and the issue of

what constitutes knowledge, containment and control within that process, is one of

Petrochemical America’s strengths. The cartography of Petrochemical America

inevitably has to participate in a rather synoptic view of American power, even if it is

21 Robert Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America, (New York: Aperture, 2012), p. 21.

30

designed to illuminate the nature of the relationship between local life and global

economics. It seems telling in this context that Misrach’s photographs often shy away

from taking an overt bird’s eye perspective on the landscape even as it uses a slightly

heightened vantage point to provide a sense of the vastness of the territory. Rather

than facilitate a form of “objective” knowledge production, the distancing effect of

the photographs becomes an oblique reminder that the pollution charted is both

underground and above ground, not always visible or even containable in terms of its

actual visualisation.

Conclusion

Petrochemical America – aside from its political and ideological message– is also

about the problems inherent to the process of mapping itself:

the difficulty in reconciling a map’s inherent abstractions against concrete areas and

locations, the ability to abstract and synthesize things that cannot be seen so readily.

In this sense, Misrach’s photographs are both problematized and redeemed by the

cartographic aesthetics of Section II because it is here that it becomes most clear that

the process of mapping is not about reproducing ‘real’ landscapes or concrete areas

per se. In order to establish the throughlines in Section II, the superimposed drawings

necessarily reduce and simplify, they spatialize particular relationships in order to

classify the region using the same mechanisms that all maps necessarily do, namely

the manipulation of distance and scale. In this sense, Section II’s use of

superimposition also provides Petrochemical America the opportunity to navigate the

ghostly presence of an earlier colonial gaze and to acknowledge that it is not

circumvented quite as easily as one might wish.

31

In political terms, an argument can be made of course that the drastically

changing landscape of the Mississippi Delta demands a more dynamic, less static

form of representation and that the use of the throughlines is simply an attempt to

creatively unseat and possibly remap a long lineage of previous cartographic

practices. Nonetheless, this does not detract from the alignments that exist between

Misrach’s fascination with the effects of the post-industrial era and the nineteenth

century cartographer’s fascination with the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

For both, the search for unmarked territory (its possibilities as well as impossibilities)

is a necessary starting point for a distinctly American type of cartography. Within the

melancholy and picturesque aspects of Misrach’s photographs, the embodiment of

industry and infrastructure in the US South may even carry an involuntary tinge of

nostalgia, or at the very least, a desire to synthesize what appears to be undeveloped

scenery with scenery irrevocably marked by development. Thus, while the

photographs on a first viewing appear resolute in their determination to eschew the

picturesque in favour of a direct, matter-of-fact descriptiveness, their particular sense

of the picturesque, situated in parking lots and vacated housing developments, is

emotive and arresting all the same. One of the points of the interaction between the

two Sections in Petrochemical America is to illuminate how - like the vanishing

wildlife and nature - the region can never be entirely recuperated. Similarly, the rich

culture – intimated through the remnants of the picturesque in Misrach’s photos – can

never be regenerated. In this sense the book functions as a remarkable photo-textual

enterprise not merely because Section II adds the necessary data for an understanding

of the loss witnessed in Section I, but because the photographs in Section I function so

adeptly as the staging areas for the later material. Our knowledge, in other words, of

what used to be on the site(s) photographed is fundamental to the ways in which we

32

read the photographs as images of displacement, both economically, environmentally

and emotionally.

To understand Petrochemical America’s aesthetic charge, one has to accept

that at the heart of environmental photography lies an oftentimes paradoxical desire:

to stage both the beauty and horror of irreversible change. Orff’s throughlines are

ways to reconstitute, to refashion the landscape through the design and over-layering

of things that used to be there but which now are gone. At the same time, the lyrical

charge of the material added on to the photographs presumes a sense of what used to

be there and a certain understanding of the biochemical, ecological, and human effects

of its disappearance. The use of pollution as spectacle is not a new thing within

topographic practice but in Petrochemical America the aesthetic quality of its

environmental photography resides partly in accepting this. At the same time, the

book is savvy enough to know that what is ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ cannot so readily be

mapped in a post-industrial world. In the end, Petrochemical America is a book of

photographs that are unwilling to speak for themselves; there is no "safe," if

increasingly embattled, aesthetics of form in this respect. To avoid the charge that it is

simply reproducing a picturesque version of the spectacle of our own fall into oil

dependency, Petrochemical America has to walk the thin line between a vision of

what has been lost and what can be recuperated; a vision enabled not by a descent into

a form of ethnographic cartography alone but through the use of particular aspects of

the picturesque. The history of aesthetic responses to landscape representation tells us

that it remains for better or for worse a part of a much longer tradition of

representation, of mapping and of cartography in general. The question is not whether

this compromises the politics of Petrochemical America, but how this particular

33

photo-text’s ecological agenda manages to coexist with its own inevitable picturesque

qualities.

Illustrations

Fig. 1. Richard Misrach, Night Releases, Mississippi River Corridor, Louisiana, 1998.

© Richard Misrach, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fig. 2. Richard Misrach, New Housing Construction, Paulina, Louisiana, 2010.

© Richard Misrach, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Fig 3. Kate Orff, ‘Bigger, Farther, Filled with More Stuff’, 2012. ©

SCAPE/Landscape Architecture PLLC.

Fig. 4. Kate Orff, ‘From Pipe to Plastic Bag’, 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape

Architecture PLLC.

Fig. 5. Kate Orff, ‘Toxic Release Mapping’, 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape Architecture

PLLC.

Fig. 6. Richard Misrach, Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, Acquired by Shell

Chemical, Geismar, Louisiana, 1998. © Richard Misrach, Courtesy of Fraenkel

Gallery, San Francisco.

34

Author Bio

Caroline Blinder is Reader in American Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths

University. Her most recent book The American Photo-Text 1930-1960, (Edinburgh

University Press, 2019) focuses on the interaction between image and text in 20th

century documentary work. She is the editor of New Critical Essays on James Agee

and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010) and has written extensively on 20th century photography including

essays on Walker Evans’s Polaroids, Art and Artefact in Wright Morris’ Photo-texts,

Municipal Chairs in the Photography of Doisneau and Kertész, Brassaï in Breton’s

Mad Love, Representations of Harlem in Roy DeCarava and articles on Dorothea

Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Weegee, and Robert Frank amongst others. Dr.

Blinder is currently the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of Art History at

Doshisha and Kobe Universities in Japan. Her first book was A Self-Made Surrealist:

Ideology and Politics in the Work of Henry Miller (2000).